The climate summit in Bonn includes a series of sessions and debates on various climate-related topics. One of these sessions is a roundtable debate on the main aspects of the climate migration issue touching on topics like climate change, human rights and forced migration. The roundtable debate, which Aalborg University has the honour of hosting, is part of the programme for ‘Climate Law and Governance Day’ conducted in connection with COP23.

CLIMATE CHANGE, HUMAN RIGHTS AND FORCED DISPLACEMENT

The roundtable seeks to understand to what extent international law is ready to include climate change effects, which do not know boarders or frontiers, such as e.g. the protection of vulnerable people who are forced to move due to climate change. Considering that the term “climate change refugee” does not exist, legally speaking, the session aims to build bridges between human rights, climate change, other law areas and other hybrid legal tools or even tools from other disciplines. The purpose of the session is to understand how we can approach crucial human rights and justice issues as well as the issue of resilience of forced displaced persons in the light of the UNFCCC protocol and in the post-2015 Paris Agreement area.

The roundtable debate on ’Climate Change, Human Rights and Forced Migration’ will be hosted by Associate Professor Sandra Cassotta from the Department of Law, Associate Professor Jesper Lindholm from the Department of Law and Assistant Professor Martin Lemberg-Pedersen from Global Refugee Studies at the Department of Culture and Global Studies.

In addition, Sandra Cassotta is the lead author of part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) coming report on the state of the Earth, and she will form part of the programme committee compiling the programme for ‘Climate Law and Governance Day’ at COP24 next year.